


This Overwhelming Silence

by entanglednow



Category: Misfits
Genre: Claustrophobia, M/M, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-09
Updated: 2010-12-09
Packaged: 2017-10-14 12:19:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/149173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nathan dreams that he's underground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Overwhelming Silence

  
Nathan dreams that he's underground.

Which is about right, because he'd spent most of his time underground pretending he was lying in bed. He'd spent it listening to his iPod until the batteries eventually gave up and died, and then listening to the silence, or the sound of his own voice. Or his own breathing, or the creak of six feet of earth _crushing him_ \- mostly not that last one.

Occasionally the moments of stark and horrible panic would be interrupted by the angry certainty that the others were a bunch of useless, unobservant bastards. Because it's hard to have the most awesome superpower ever when _no one fucking knows it._ There'd been no light from his phone to show him the size of the space he'd been in, though he'd known. He'd known exactly how far he could move his legs, his arms. He'd worked out how much leverage he could get behind a kick against the lid of the coffin - not much. The flatly pathetic thud of it had been one of the most hopeless noises he'd ever heard. Though he couldn't quite make himself stop doing it. Every thump ringing through his head.

He'd tried masturbating as a distraction. Because he'd found that was a fantastic distraction from most things. But it turned out it was hard to work up a good head of steam when you had to hold your breath for most of it. Choking to death at the end of it through lack of oxygen - not half as much fun as the porn made it out to be.

Nathan had purposely thought about everything _except_ the possibility that he'd be buried six feet underground forever. That no one would ever come and dig him out. He'd just end up laying there, choking to death on carbon dioxide over and over and over. _Forever_. He'd thought, briefly, about trying to claw his way out, zombie style. About ripping away the material and breaking through the wood (because in his fantasy he could totally have done that.) But then he'd thought about the dirt showering in on him, smothering him until he didn't know which way was up and which was down. It occurred to him that he might accidentally claw his way deeper underground, clawing and choking on dirt over and over and never reaching the surface. Like some sort of mole creature.

Sometimes that's what he dreams about.

He'll thrash himself awake, fully expecting his elbows and knees to slam into the padded edges of his own coffin. Only to find empty space and the faraway glow of a vending machine and the dizzy, almost-wrong relief of it will leave him shaking and sweating like he has some horrible disease. As if he'd puke his internal organs out if they only stopped shaking long enough. Like his body's playing the world's most un-funny fucking practical joke on him, and has no intention of stopping until it'd wrung the last laugh out of it.

He always wakes up with no air in his throat, a rattled out hiss all he can manage in place of a scream. Which is probably a good thing because having someone report some crazy man wailing in here at two in the morning - not exactly good for his image.

Dying was fucking easy compared to this.

Sometimes he still feels like he's choking, even when he's awake.

He clambers his way up out of the bed he'd made, because he can't lay there any more. He can't even sit against the railing, can't feel the soft crush of the rolled up pillow against his back, or the blanket under his fingers. He's left them thrown untidily in a heap, half trailing across the floor. Staring accusingly at him and asking him why he's such a fucking pussy.

He paces with his phone, the glow from the screen lighting up the centre, all hard edges and empty space. But he still has to open a window - the wind from outside instantly dragging all the hair on his arms up. Because it's _freezing_ and he doesn’t even care. He hits the phonebook, scrolls down and finds Kelly, who's not under 'Kelly' but that doesn't matter.

But when he dials he gets nothing but an automated voice.

"Who the fuck turns their phone off? Who does that? Fine, fuck you." Nathan thinks about throwing the phone across the room. He thinks about it. Then he thinks about trying to piece it back together, when it's in a hundred bloody shards and then expecting to be able to make any outgoing calls from its sad, mangled remains. "Fuck you," he says again, mostly to the phone this time, squeezing it hard in his hand until it creaks warningly.

He paces from one side of the gangway to the other, refuses to look at his bed again. He'll leave the whole mess of it staring at his back, like the world's creepiest collection of folds and lumps - and if he goes on like that he'll have to turn around and look just to make sure they're not slinking off into the darkness, ready to strangle him later. It's not like it would even be that weird, considering some of the shit they've been through.

He phones Curtis instead. Curtis is normal, Curtis is a voice of normality. It's impossible not to feel like a dull, ordinary member of the human race when you're talking to Curtis. Curtis's phone is engaged. Who the fuck is he talking to at two in the morning? No, that's obvious, _obvious_. He hits Alisha's name and isn't surprised at all when she comes back engaged as well. They're having phonesex at two in the morning, completely bloody oblivious that he's in dire need of conversation or he'll end up completely and totally mental. It will be absolutely their fault if he goes mental while they're talking about how much they want to shove their genitals against each other, while masturbating.

Miserable fuckers. What sort of friends are they? He's clearly in some sort of complex psychological need here and they've all got better things to do. He's seriously tempted to toss his phone then, because the satisfaction of watching it smash into a thousand pieces like the piece of useless shit it is, will almost certainly make him feel better.

But instead he's scrolling down again, hitting the call button before he even thinks about it.

He's even more pathetic than he worried he was.

Simon isn't under 'Simon' in his phone, he isn't even under 'Barry.' He'd probably be unbelievably pissed off if he found out how Nathan had chosen to immortalise him in his phonebook.

It rings five times. He was probably awake already, making some sort of hideous papier mache replica of one of his murder victims, or possibly one of them? Maybe later he'll set it on fire just to watch it burn.

"Hello?" Simon sounds confused, Nathan can hear that funny crease between his eyes he gets when he's never quite sure whether Nathan's insulting him or not. Oddly enough it's the same expression he gets every time someone threatens to horribly murder them.

"Barry," Nathan says. Because it was either that or the name in his phonebook and 'Barry' is probably safer.

"Nathan," Simon says. "It's two o'clock in the morning. What do you want?"

"Masturbating alone has finally lost its edge. I thought to myself, hey, you're not friends until you've awkwardly overheard someone masturbating through the phone."

"I'm hanging up now," Simon tells him.

Nathan makes a noise which sounds like 'no' or something like 'no' anyway. Though he refuses to describe its exact nature. Simon doesn't hang up. Nathan just breathes into the silence for a long time. Simon listens, because he's a creepy weirdo and he probably has nothing better to do.

"I keep dreaming about being buried alive," Nathan says eventually. Which comes out less like the complaint he was aiming for and more like some sort of desperate and pathetic plea for help. He's not quite sure how to fix that. "Which is cutting into my masturbation time like you wouldn't believe."

There's more silence on the other end of the phone. Then eventually something that sounds like a sigh.

"You're not underground any more," Simon says.

Nathan suddenly hates him so much he could twist his fucking head right off.

"Oh, thank you, thank you for that fucking obvious observation, Captain Fucking Obvious. I know I'm not underground. I know that, I bloody know that. Tell my stupid body that and my stupid brain and my stupid sub-conscious, which is clearly defective, or broken. Or maybe it just hates me. Maybe it thinks I deserve this. Maybe this is the price of immortality, an unavoidable streak of insanity to go with my devilish good looks and my immeasurable capacity for inventive bullshit." Nathan stops talking and just seethes quietly for a second.

"I don't know what you want me to say." Simon sounds like he's apologising now. It's completely unfair that Simon sounds apologetic while Nathan still wants to be angry because that just makes him want to be _more_ of a bastard and though that will probably make him feel better it will also, he assumes, end the conversation. Which will lead to his phone ending up in glittery pieces of useless technology spread liberally through the community centre.

Nathan tries to somehow convey this down the phone - though he's fairly sure it comes out sounding like the savage war cry of some sort of weasel. Whatever it is, it ends with a strangled profanity.

"I don't know what I want you to say. I don't know. What do normal, ordinary, stable people who aren't us do in situations like this? Reassure me I'm not going mad, tell me it will all be fine. That I was in a supremely messed up situation and I'll get over it eventually. Lie to me, I don't fucking care."

Nathan let his forehead hit the window with a 'thunk.' The glass is freezing and his breath turns the pane opaque.

Simon sighs.

"You were in a messed up situation. And I don't think you're going mad. I don't think anyone could blame you for being a bit..."

"Pissed off about it? You buried me." Nathan's pacing again, he can hear the phone creaking under his fingers.

"You were _dead_ ," Simon insists, and Nathan can hear the scrunchy forehead thing again.

"Only temporarily," Nathan snaps.

"We didn't know that at the time. We didn't know you were going to come back."

"That's not an excuse. You could have checked. You could have made sure."

"How exactly were we supposed to do that? Did you want us to chop off your head or something?" There's a weird rustling, shifting noise like Simon's climbing out of a nest or crawling into a wardrobe.

Nathan screws his nose up. "Are you in bed?"

"It's two in the morning," Simon points out. As if the idea of being anywhere else at two in the morning is _madness._

Nathan has a sudden horrible thought. "You're talking to me while you're in bed. Oh my god, that's disturbing. Are you naked?"

"I'm not naked." Simon sounds so utterly scandalised that Nathan's laughing, a breath of echoing, ridiculous laughter.

"Of course you're not naked, you've probably never been naked in your life. You probably wear the world's most boring pyjamas. And you probably do all the buttons up."

There's a guilty silence on the other end of the phone. Nathan can practically hear him protectively touching all his pyjama buttons. He slides down the railing, puts his feet up on the wall.

"You're touching your buttons aren't you, Barry?" Nathan gets as much filthy innuendo into that as he can.

There's another moment of quietly embarrassed (and possibly also guilty) silence.

"Maybe I should make you undo all your buttons while I listen."

There's definitely something to the awkward silence on the other end - no, not quite silence. There's that little snorty noise like Simon's either offended or weirdly turned on. Nathan's going to go for 'weirdly turned on' every time. Because it's Simon.

"Come on, Barry, phonesex is so much more fun when you're not doing it on your own while other people threaten to call the police."

"Stop calling me Barry," Simon complains, without admitting whether or not he's touching anything. Or whether he wants to.

Nathan grunts into the phone.

"I'll think about it." He thinks about it, tongue sliding over his teeth. "How do you feel about Cassandra?"

" _Nathan_ ," Simon protests, with the tired insistence of someone who already knows that Nathan very rarely cares what the rest of the world believes to be 'true.'

Nathan grins to himself. "I like Cassandra, it makes you sound slutty and available."

Simon really has that long-suffering sigh down.

"You could touch yourself through your pyjamas while I tell you you've been a bad girl." Nathan puts a growl in his voice, just for the hell of it.

There's a weird noise which could either be a laugh or an inhale - Nathan's honestly not sure because the phone's slipped back past his ear where he's sprawled out on his bed again. On the evil blankets.

"Goodnight, Nathan," Simon says, quietly but firmly.

"Goodnight, Cassandra."

Simon hangs up.

Definitely a Cassandra.


End file.
